I will be boring the hell out of you later with techy posts inspired by the exciting discussions i’ve had at the internet governance forum in Vilnius.
As the ones on twitter might have noticed I have suddenly gone all polite, totally lost my sense of humor and started flooding everyone with tweets on internet governance , freedom of expression , accessibility and most importantly gender issues.
I have assured the “extremely” worried friends that no one hacked my account and I promised an explanation later as a blog post – so here it is :
Couple of months ago, Nadine Moawad hired me to help investigate the existing censorship tools used by the Lebanese government (if any) and evaluate the risk of possible or future threats or “plans” with a special focus on censorship from a women sexuality and queer perspective.
Of course I was eager to work with Nadine on this and many of you maybe recall that i was asking and poking everyone on twitter about this.

The findings got incorporated into the EROTICS research (something on the lines of exploratory research on ICT and sexuality) – and thanks to Nadine’s awesomeness and efforts I got my ticket attend the Internet Governance Forum and of course team up with Tamara Qiblawi to do research and mischief .

So what the hell this Internet Governance thing is about ?
In one sentence : It is a space organized by the United Nations where governments , companies, NGOs, Official bodies, civil society, individuals, activists and geeks sit together and discuss the governance of the internet, plan its future, share their worries and challenges, express different points of view on hot topics and establish social networking connection that would allow them later on to collaborate and all this in a multi stake holder like system.

In other words, it is a place where I got to meet THE people who help set policies in every single major company, the most engaging and hard working NGOs were there, all the freedom fighters and kick ass activists, the most awesome feminists, the sharpest young people from around the world , govt. reps.
So I leave you to imagine the level of energy, excitement, interesting-ness and the intensity of the conversation that was happening there.

I have tons to share – Hope I teased you enough, now I am off to get some sleep – eat some home made food , meet some friends and drink those wicked bottles of Lithuanian alcohol i got with me.

Note to Nadine: I owe you
Note to Tamara : Come on – seriously !

For some weird reasons, friends tend to buy me books when they want to get me something nice even tho my amazon wish-list clearly states that i want a Cessna 182 small personal driven plane . I always get ignored, but what can one do with such sucky friends, i learned to move on and read those books *sigh* and in order to brag and look educated and such i decided to add a small section to this blog called my readings where i share stuff that i read and write up a small review. those reviews will mostly help me self-reflect on the book and hopefully motivate someone else to read as well . I am starting the series by :

Sum, forty tales from the afterlives
by David Eagleman

I got this book from an existentialist friend @joellehatem – first i was a bit reluctant on reading it – I am feeling bit touchy about stuff on “afterlife” specially now and i was worried it ends up like those philosophy/religion books all blabering and complex bullshit theories :) but after reading the first 2-3 pages I was totally hooked and knew that this book is gonna quickly become one of my top favorite books :)

This book has forty tales each 2 or 3 pages long. each tale tells you what happens when you die. The stories are amazingly smart and genius, in my opinion each 2 or 3 pages speak about life – not the afterlife- more than loads of volumes written by others and the beauty of it is that you are left to meditate on the meaning of those funky/unusual tales who offer a new perspective on a topic not-often reflected upon (at least by me)

I really really really highly recommend this book, like honestly read it ! and to have a little fun, I asked @joellehatem if she is interested to write up her own tale of afterlife – sadly she doesn’t seem to have the time, so i decided to write up a tale for her .

Afterlife tale number 41 :
There is no “one” afterlife that fits everyone. each person is unique and each of us gets their own version of afterlife.afterall we all have our personal demons and our “over the clouds” moments.

So i can’t really tell you what happens in the afterlife in general , but rather zoom in and tell you the afterlife of a specific person.
Just as a totally random example,totally random, here what would be the afterlife of an OCD existensitatist , for the sake of an easier story telling, let us suppose their name was @joellehatem :

Heaven :
Existentialists are one of the few people who welcome afterlife with un-matched curiosity and eagerness because it offers answers to long dwelled-upon questions. questions like why are we here ? are we here ? where is here ? why aren’t we somewhere else? what is somewhere else ? blablabla….

so in their heaven, existentialists get all their answers, clear definitive answers.
When the first existentialists went to heaven, god was happy to interview them in person, he thought their questions were cute and their eagerness to listen to him was heart warming. Having someone who actually cared and questioned what he did seemed nice for a change and god welcomed his smart subjects and enjoyed the conversation.
However, as the existentialism trends grew on earth, more and more of those started going to heaven, the questions became harder and so many, god either got tired of repeating stuff over and over again or found some questions embarrasingly hard.
so god eventually spared himself the trouble and assigned each existentialist a guardian angel whose mission was to answer those never ending questions and musings. he chose the smartest and wisest of all angels but those damn existentialist were never satisfied and they started to form existentialist clubs where they got together , discussed stuff , read books and formed committees to debate different answers.

so when our joellehatem dies, if she goes to heaven, she will be first received by an old wise angel who will hand her a free subscription to the existentialist library where she gets to search and read all the answers on her mind in the great book, reviewed by god himself called :the answers to life , the universe and everything else.
It is not really one book that you can put in your handbag, it is more like a collection of chapters spread across aisles and aisles in the library.
the wise old angel will be there for her to answer any question she wants – if he can -

Hell:
Now let us suppose joellehatem went to hell – here is what her hell would seem like.
First, at the front door, there is a weird sign that says
Joelle at first frowns, shrugs and ignores the sign . as the devil in person opens the door for her, she notices a weird change, she is suddenly gone mute. it will take her a minute to realize what is happening, she has not gone mute exactly, but actually she can’t say “thank you” for someone who opened the door for her (regardless, if it was the door of hell or not ). so first thing in hell : no thank you

Joelle then enters somehow a messy room, with tons of books in it and the devil leaves her alone with a wide smirk upon his face. she thinks for herself, this is not bad for a hell, i just can’t say thank you, that is all ! and it is not long before she gets bored, and wants to start reading.
as she wanders in the room, first she notices that all the books are in their wrong sections, she tries to rearrange them, but to no avail, the books magically return to a more chaotic distribution each time she tries. she then notices that the covers of the books are different from the books themselves and it is an impossible task to tear off the covers and re-arrange them all . the OCD in her roars in anger and almost swears at the devil, almost swears because she catches herself, the devil gave her books eventually, she is almost feeling thankful for him, only if he didn’t pull that OCD trick on her. *sigh* so she sets her mind to start reading to ease down the anger.
As she starts her first book, she suddenly understands the reason behind the wide smirk of Mr Devil. each and every book contains existentialist thoughts and questions that have not occurred to joelle yet, many answers for each question are discussed, yet each answer is proven wrong and each book promises that another book can really answer those questions
joelle will not be really able to stop reading, the more she reads , the more her angst will grow, the more she will know what she does not know.
in this room, she is alone, tortured by her own mind, what kind of a more cruel hell you want for an existentialist ?

and the lesson from this afterlife tale is ? : never buy me books :P

Sadly, every once in a while, i hear bloggers being arrested and harrased in many countries

It always makes me feel super irritated – how can someone get arrested for this ?! There is a zilion way to avoid detection and stay anonymous on the web and a million and one way to avoid censorship ! and each time i hear such news, i put my hands in fist and swear to contact cyber activists to put one anti-evil plan i have in mind in action.

Needless to say, that this has never worked for a reason or another – it is either busy schedule or mostly lack of connections with activists or lack of communication/social skills

But since i really wanna get started on this because it became an annoyingly nagging item in the back of my head, i decided to publish a series of posts on security, avoiding censorship ranging from the complex ones to the super easy

I am starting with the super easy tips and tutorials – cuz it is more likely that smart and easy stuff gets applied. Feel free to copy, translate and share anything you see here on the topic and please get in touch

The first thing I would like to share is a plugin for one of the most widespread blogging platforms aka the totally awesome wordpress

This plugin is called Censortive.

The concept of this plugin is really simple :

Censorship software scans blog posts for a black list of words and censors or flags them accordingly.

Censortive simply uses text-to-image technology and replaces those words with their graphic equivalent making them invisible to censorship robots.

It is really a light-weight system, you install and activate the plugin and just place the words you want to hide between

Here is a sample :

Dear Mr President, it is easier to [*fuck yourself in the ass*] with your own [*dick*] than to prevent freedom of speech on the web.

You can notice a slight difference in the font for “fuck yourself in the ass” and “dick’ and if you right click on the censored words and click save as, you will notice that you can save as image .

There are also other features like ability to have different fonts in the images to create a better user experience and you can also configure codewords.

Please take a look at Censortive website for full details on installation and features, I am available for free support when facing any problems.

Fall backs :

Here are the fall-backs that i can think of, please share if there are others :

• It is not SEO friendly – the images are invisible to censorship robots AND to search engines. This may be easy to overlook if you are using this against “curse” words – they are not likely to get you traffic anyway. But if you are masking important keywords this may affect the number of hits you get from search engines.
• It is not human-proof : all humans see alike, if the government is using human power, not software to censor and monitor, this method will have 0 impact. So famous activist blogs might be already under “personal” and “close” monitoring and this will not be useful for them .

I didn’t have the chance to test this against actual censorship software since i happen to live in a non-censored environment, please let me know if you can give me remote desktop access for testing.

Stay tuned for more posts, I am keeping them under serial name, so they show in related posts and are easy to find and if i didn’t update soon enough, please nag, it always works !